‘I lay awake most of the night.’ She said this without moving, as if her limbs were tied to the sheet. ‘And do you know what I could hear?’
Seb was standing at the end of the bed in just his boxer shorts, drinking a glass of water.
‘No, honey, what could you hear?’ He raised a brow, waiting for it.
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Nothing. Not a sound. Just total and utter silence. And do you know what I could see?’
‘Let me guess…’ He smirked.
‘Nothing.’ She started to push herself up the bed. ‘I could see nothing. It was black. Pitch bloody black. I couldn’t even have made it to the bathroom if I’d needed to. I couldn’t see my fingers in front of my face.’
‘I think that’s nice. Cosy.’
‘It’s like being in a coffin buried underground. Where are the street lights? Where are the cars? What does everyone do after ten o’clock? Does no one go out?’ She was so tired she wanted to just bury her head under the pillows. The engulfing darkness of the night had made what was bad seem worse. ‘I thought the countryside was meant to be being ruined by motorways and lorries and flight paths.’ Seb gulped down the last of his water as she pulled the sheet up towards her chin. ‘I didn’t hear any bloody planes,’ she said. ‘At least an animal would have been good. A fox or an owl or something. Anything. A cow mooing would have sufficed.’
‘Anna, are you going to get up?’ Seb said, going over to a suitcase to pull out a shirt he’d ironed before they’d left the Bermondsey flat. Always prepared for every eventuality, she thought. Some Scout motto or something. She saw him look at his watch as she rolled herself in the sheet and turned away so she could stare at the crack in the wallpaper join. The little leaves didn’t match up. She thought about the clean white walls of their old place, the wooden floors she padded across to make a breakfast of yoghurt and plump, juicy blueberries.
‘You’ll be late for work,’ he said, looking down at his buttons as he did them up.
While Seb had landed his dream job of teaching at Nettleton High, getting back to his roots as he put it, Anna was about to begin a new career working in a little antique shop that her dad had pulled in a favour for. If her memory served her correctly, it was a grubby hovel that she had had to sit in as a child while he haggled the price of his wares up before he took her to ballet lessons. It was going to pay her six pounds fifty an hour.
‘Come on, get up and we can have coffee in the village before I have to go to school.’
‘Do you think there’s a Starbucks?’ she asked, brow raised.
‘You know there isn’t a Starbucks.’ He rolled his eyes.
‘It was a joke!’ she said, heaving herself up. ‘You have to allow me a joke or two.’
‘You have to allow me some semblance of enjoying this.’
‘I am!’ She put her hand on her chest. ‘That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m trying, I promise.’
He didn’t look at her, just fumbled around in his suitcase trying to find his tie. She bent down and fished one out of the side pocket of a different bag and went over and hung it round his neck.
She thought about the look on his face when she’d told him that The Waldegrave had gone into administration. That all their money was gone. Everything. That even just the loss of the fifty percent deposit was actually the whole shebang. That she hadn’t been exactly truthful about the extent of the cost.
And he had turned to the side for just a fraction of a second, clenching his face up, all the muscles rigid, shut his eyes, taken a breath. Then he’d turned back, eyes open, squeezed her hand in his and said, ‘It’s OK. It’ll be OK.’
She turned his collar up now and laced the tie underneath, knotting it over and looked up at him and said, ‘I will try harder.’
He shook his head and laughed, ‘All I want to do is have coffee with you before my first day of school.’
‘And that, my darling,’ she said with a smile, hauling the sheet further round her like a toga, squashing the part of her that wanted to sneak back under the covers, and kissing him on the cheek, ‘Is all I want to do, too!’
He raised a brow like he didn’t quite believe her but was happy to go with it.
Driving to the village, Seb had trouble with the narrow lanes, bramble branches flicking into the window as he had to keep swerving into the bushes as Golf GTIs and mud-splattered Land Rovers hurtled past on the other side of the road, beeping his London driving.
‘It’s a fucking nightmare,’ he said, loosening his tie, knuckles gripping the steering wheel. ‘You just can’t see what’s coming.’
‘I thought you always said you knew these roads like the back of your hand.’ Anna straightened the sun-visor mirror to check her reflection. She’d been told by Mrs Beedle, the antiques shop owner, on the phone to wear something she didn’t mind getting mucky in. Anna didn’t own anything she minded getting mucky. Her wardrobe had predominantly consisted of Marc Jacob pantsuits, J Brand jeans and key Stella McCartney pieces. The only memory of them now were the piles of jiffy bags that she had stuffed them into and mailed out to the highest eBay bidder. For today’s outfit she had settled on a pair of khaki shorts that she had worn on safari three years ago and the most worn of her black tank-tops.
‘I did. I think they’ve planted new hedgerows since my day.’
Anna snorted and pulled her sunglasses down from the top of her head, closing her eyes and trying to imagine herself on some Caribbean beach absorbing the wall of heat, about to dive into the ocean, or settled into the box at the Opera House to watch the dress rehearsal, sipping champagne or a double vodka martini.
‘Eh voila,’ Seb said a minute later, cutting the engine and winding up his window.
She opened her eyes slowly like a lizard in the desert.
There it was.
Nettleton village.
The sight of it seemed to lodge her heart in her throat. Her brow suddenly speckled with sweat.
‘OK?’ Seb asked before he opened the door.
Anna snorted, ‘Yeah, yeah, fine.’ She unclicked her door and let one tanned leg follow the other to the cobbles. Unfurling herself from their little hatchback, she stretched her back and shoulders and surveyed the scene as if looking back over old photographs. Through the hazy morning mist of heat, she could see all the little shops surrounding the village square, the avenue of lime trees that dripped sticky sap on the pavement and cars, the church at the far end by the pond and the playground, the benches dappled with the shade from the big, wide leaves of the overhanging trees. Across the square was the pharmacy, its green cross flashing and registering the temperature at twenty-seven degrees. She looked at her watch, it was only eight o’clock. The window still had those old bottles of liquid like an apothecary shop, one red one green, it could have been her imagination playing tricks on her but she thought she remembered them from when she was a kid. Next to that was the newsagent, Dowsetts. A bit of A4 paper stuck on the door saying only two school children at a time. Now that she did remember. Three of them would go in deliberately and cause Mrs Norris apoplexy as they huddled together picking the penny sweets out one at a time and pretending to put them in their pockets. Then, when her friend Hermione locked Mrs Norris in the store cupboard one lunchtime, it earned them a lifetime ban. Did that still stand, she wondered. Would she be turned away if she dared set foot inside? Or was it like prison? Twelve years or less for good behaviour?
Nettleton, she thought, hands on her hips, there it was, all exactly as she remembered it.
Seb